Visitation rights
by StevenQ
Summary: Lara does some thinking and visits Sam in jail. Takes place before, during and after Rise Of The Tomb Raider
1. Chapter 1

Notes: So I'm dissatisfied with Sam's absence in RotTR. I'm not thrilled with the way the comics ended because I feel like Lara has already demonstrated how far she's willing to go for Sam, a little bit further won't hurt.

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"I thought I told you to go," Samantha Nishimura said sullenly as she picked up the phone. It was the only way to make herself heard as she sat on the far side of reinforced prison glass.

Opposite her sat her oldest friend, her closest friend, Lara Croft. The woman who had saved her body on Yamatai, but hadn't quite succeeded in saving her soul. Every time Sam looked at a mirror, a reflection on glass, or closed her eyes, she could see the ancient Sun Queen gazing back at her.

Lara knew this, and there was something faintly predatory about the look in her eyes. "You did." She responded mildly, and something inside Sam began to worry. Lara was never the bubbly party girl she'd been, but for the first time since Lara had picked her up off her bar stool and carried her home while in college, Sam had no idea what the other girl was thinking.

"I'll be leaving soon in fact. My expose on Yamatai didn't exactly work the way I'd hoped."

Sam was definitely confused at this. Of course she didn't exactly get periodicals in jail, but she had been paying attention where possible to see if anyone would pick up on the more outlandish stories from the island. Surely between the various survivors, not to mention the many bodies of cultists Lara had left behind something would have got out.

Lara continued talking as if they hadn't just been silent for the best part of a minute. "While I was doing it, I had a thought, and that's why I'm here."

"Here to share your wisdom Croft?" came the snapped reply. Sam was horrified even as she said it, but it was becoming harder and harder to keep that evil little voice in her head quiet. She knew, somewhere deep inside her soul that sooner or later, she would fail and Himiko would have her next victim.

Lara just shook her head. "No Sam, I'm here to apologise." The archaeologist shifted in her chair, coming forward to put herself almost nose to nose with the glass separating them. "I was broken after Yamatai, and I spent my time trying to deal with my own problems, my own nightmares and I lost sight of the fact that almost all of my injuries were easy to spot."

Almost unwillingly Sam's eyes were drawn to Lara's body. Most of it was covered by a dirty grey hoodie and her leather coat, a look which she might have described as crack-addict chic on anyone else, but even the small amount of skin it showed had examples of the damage wrought on her by their four-day ordeal on Yamatai.

"I didn't want to deal with your problems because if I did, I might have to admit that I didn't get to you in time. That I failed to save my best friend on Yamatai. That if I'd been faster, better, I might have gotten to you sooner and stopped all of it."

There was an intensity in Lara's eyes now. "So I'm here to make you a promise, and to deliver a message to the wretched part of Himiko's soul that's stuck inside you."

Something ugly twisted Sam's face, even as she fought down the wave of negative emotions. "Words are cheap Lara Croft," she heard her own voice say.

If her eyes had been intense before, they pretty well blazed now. "True, but you'll see the actions soon enough, because I finally pieced it together. I finally understand what happened, why you fought with the police and assaulted a man on the street. It's because Sam is stronger than you Himiko, you sociopathic _cunt_."

The bellow of rage was loud enough to acutely worry the nearby guard into action, but Lara held up an imperious hand and he stopped. The watch officer had been painfully, almost brutally clear. Croft was to have fifteen minutes, and unless the inmate was physically violent to herself, he was to do nothing.

"How dare you….you…. common born wretch," came the hissed response as one of Sam's hands landed on the glass. "I am nobility, ruler of the lands and the weather besides."

If Himiko had known Lara better, she might have noticed the glint of triumph in the other girl's eyes. Sam saw it, and it made her silently cheer on her friend. She had never heard Lara swear like that, with a calculated viciousness designed purely to goad Himiko into responding. Or to put it the way Roth had, once after a card game aboard the Endurance, 'You got played son.'

"You don't have your powers here Himiko," Lara responded her voice almost friendly. "You might have got a part of your soul time-sharing in Sam's body, but not your powers. Some part of Sam understood how dangerous you are anyway, and deliberately arranged to be put in a place where you can't hurt anyone. They are _never_ going to let you out of there Himiko."

The rage was subsiding within Sam, leaving only the hot feeling of hatred flowing through her. "That's a lie," Himiko snarled, but it lacked conviction.

"Sam is smarter than most people gave her credit for, and Sam. My Sam," she said in a voice that was oddly possessive and proud. "She would never leave you roaming free in her body if she could do anything about it."

"Lara," Sam said, her throat dry, managing to regain control from the evil within. Even now she couldn't wrench away that control easily, but Himiko lacked the endurance to control her for very long. "How?"

Something softened in the other girls' gaze. "Once I wrote about Yamatai, I was able to actually start thinking again, and I thought about you and your behaviour. It didn't add up. Himiko wouldn't want to be caught out because she knows that without either her storm powers or her followers, she's got nothing. But you Sam, you know the one place that you can go where Himiko won't be let out again."

Sam choked back a sob as she listened. She had expected to have to push Lara away, to have actually succeeded in doing so, only to find out that her friend did know her better than she had any right to hope. After everything Lara had done to save her on Yamatai, how could she have done any less once she realised that some part of Himiko was still in her.

She had been very careful to not even really think about her plan, lest Himiko realise what she was going to do the next time there was an 'incident', and the evil Sun Queen had been taken completely by surprise when Sam was arrested and deliberately made the choice to make it worse so that she'd remain incarcerated.

"Thank you Lara," she finally managed. She only got a headshake in return.

"Don't thank me yet. I am leaving, but that's because I've spent a lot of time with my dad's journals. He wrote about all sorts of stuff I dismissed as nonsense, before Yamatai. Now however, I'm inclined to believe a lot more of it, and that means I have options."

She put a hand on the glass, and Sam mimicked it, there hands coming the closest to touching that they had, or would for some time. "And here's my promise. Somewhere in this world is a means to rip that decayed remnant out of you, and I'm going to find it. I don't care if I have to spend my trust fund, sell Croft manor, or bankrupt myself to do it. Your time has passed Himiko, and I will find a way to revoke your squatters' rights and send you straight to hell."

The guard coughed and glanced at his watch, and Lara nodded.

"Stay strong Sam. I can't tell you where I'm going on the off chance that Himiko might figure out a way to use it against me, but don't lose faith. I'm not going to give up on you, and you shouldn't either."

As she got up out of her chair, her eyes locked on Sam's, Lara swallowed once. "I don't say this as often as I should, but ever since my parents died, you're the closest thing I've had to family. You mean the world to me, and I love you Sam, and whatever ancient secrets I have to discover, graves I have to desecrate and Tomb's I have to raid, I'm going to fix this."

With that she turned and left, and Sam gently placed the phone back in its cradle. Himiko's rage boiled through her like lava, and Sam didn't care at all. Despite everything, Lara was still in her corner. She was still coming to save her, just like she always did, and the joy of that eclipsed any feelings Himiko might try to force through.

Oh she had no doubt that Himiko would fight her on this, might even succeed from time to time, but now Sam had a wall to place her back squarely against in order to fight back. A comforting British wall armed with twin pistols named Lara Croft.

This fight had only just begun.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes:** This chapter contains spoilers for Rise Of The Tomb Raider. If you haven't played it, I'm spoiling I think three major end game plot elements. Please be warned.

 **Notes:** Second, this fic which started out planned as a one-shot before it grew in my head will be moving forward as frequently as I can reasonably update it. 

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**Twilightmoon77:** You and me both. Sam's general fandom portrayal bugs me in general. Don't forget that in Tomb Raider she successfully stole a walkie-talkie while under guard and was later seen shooting and killing people trying to recapture her during the Shanty-town escape. Sure, she isn't the steelwilled badass that Lara is, but she isn't stupid by any means. I intend to highlight that on a few different occasions.

 **Reckreator:** You probably want to skip this chapter if you haven't played Rise yet. I will try and keep specific spoilers to a minimum for future chapters, but this one spoils everything pretty badly.

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Lara never heard Sofia coming until the other woman's voice intruded on the silence, and even then the remnant warrior had tones soft enough to be mistaken for part of the landscape. She had been sitting at a makeshift campsite near the observatory, looking out over the waterfall into the depths of the river below, and the sky so crystal clear it could only be seen when civilisation was many many miles away.

"Over here," she called back and marvelled again at how quietly the people who called the geothermal valley home could move when they wanted to. It was perhaps unsurprising given the detailed manuals she'd found on how they trained their hunters and scouts, and they did have the advantage of having known the place for literally centuries. Despite that, it bothered Lara, for she was far too used to being aware of almost everything around her. The entire reason she'd escaped the party that was happening down in the village was because she was far too keenly aware of how happy everyone was.

Tonight wasn't a night for concerns however, not for the remnant people. Trinity had been smashed, Konstantin and the deathless were gone, and so was Jacob. Even as the other woman sat down next to her, and dangled her own legs over the cliffside that thought managed to sour the peace she'd come up here to find. For all that she considered her trip here to be a 'win' in terms of having stopped Trinity, her larger goal of finding a way to break Himiko out of Sam had failed. The Divine source might be a tool for immortality, but she'd come here because of the vain hope that her father's notes that it could 'soothe and heal the soul as well as the body' had been true.

Sofia passed her a flask and she took a swig, enjoying the taste of the locally made wine even as thoughts about where to go next chased around her head. "I'll be leaving in the morning," she finally told the other woman. "I want to stay, the valley is beautiful and peaceful, but I have a mission."

"Your friend Sam?" Sofia asked gently and Lara's head whipped round in surprise. Sofia shrugged. "Your friend Jonah was a bit out of it after my father healed him, and when I asked why you were really here he mentioned her."

"Of course he did," Lara sighed without heat. Jonah had nearly died to help her, so she could forgive him speaking out of turn. Compared to her own failures it was pretty minor anyway. "I had hoped the Divine Source would let me heal her soul."

"What happened?" Sofia asked gently, taking back the flask and drinking deeply from it. "If it's not a big secret."

"It's not, and you might actually believe me. Sam is," she hesitated for a moment, thinking about the best way to put it. "She has a fragment of an ancient and corrupt sorceress in her, and I've been looking for anything regarding the soul, proof of it and ways to heal it or draw it out in order to try and get it out. That's why I wanted the Source, the legends say that it could heal the sick and dying, and fix a broken soul."

"And so you hoped to use the source to heal her," Sofia finished and Lara nodded. "And if it allowed you to save your fathers reputation at the same time then it would have been a double victory."

"My father is dead, and I'm in the process of spending the Croft fortune to save Sam," Lara explained. "If I could prove that my father wasn't crazy, then I could probably convince people to fund me, and that would give me more options to try and save her."

Sofia nodded as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world. "You love her."

"I do," Lara admitted after a long pause. "Sam was always very free with the word, she loved everyone. I don't think I've said it to more than two people since my parents died. When I say it, I want it to have meaning."

"Of course," Sofia agreed, but there was something in her eyes that Lara resolved not to examine too closely. As if she other woman knew something that Lara didn't. "Words used too freely lose all their meaning. I prefer action anyway."

That statement was met by a chuckle. "I'll drink to that," Lara said and took a long deep swig of the wine before leaning back in the grass and looking up at the stars. "Tomorrow I go back to action. Jonah has already gone ahead to arrange transport and I'll take Ana with me when I leave. Then it's back to my fathers journals and trying to find the next magical macguffin and hope this one works."

"Macguffin?" Sofia queried and Lara remembered once again that they had been isolated for a long time. It was amazing any of them spoke conversational English at all to be honest.

"In stories the Macguffin is the artifact that the hero is chasing and the villain is trying to use to rule the world. Doesn't matter what it is, some times the stories never say, just that it's important and everyone is chasing it. On Yamatai, I was chasing Sam, who had been kidnapped by an insane cult. Here I was chasing the Source and trying to stop Trinity. Next time?" she let the sentence trail off.

"I don't know if you're a hero to others Lara Croft, but you are a hero to many in this valley tonight. Trinity would have won if not for you, and whatever changes it brings to our valley, and what it cost us," her voice turned hoarse as she remembered her own dead, including her father. "People are alive today that wouldn't have been if not for you. So while you think over your next move, don't forget the good you've done. "

She reached into a pocked and pulled out a thin black leather necklace with a pouch on it, and passed it to Lara. She recognized the symbol on the pouch as a representation of the prophet and Kitezh.

"We have always made poultices and talismans for healing and luck," Sofia explained. "We know they don't really contain magic, but they provide comfort. This one I made from the dust I recovered from the chamber of souls, from my father, the deathless and the Source. Perhaps carrying the memory of the people you helped will give you peace."

Raising an eyebrow she looked back at Sofia even as she gently put the necklace over her head and settled it under her t-shirt, mindful of the gift she'd been given. Lara turned her eyes back to the stars as Sofia got up and moved to leave. Before the woman she'd come to think of as a comrade got too far away Lara couldn't help but call out.

"I killed a lot of people," she said. "Can I still be a hero with this much blood on my hands?"

Sofia turned her head slightly, "If the heroes in your stories manage to achieve great victories without any bloodshed, then they are pure fiction." She nodded once to Lara and left, leaving the flask of wine behind, and something in the back of Lara's mind agreed with the remnant woman. She wasn't reconciled to all the things she'd done, but those concerns could wait a day. Tomorrow she would worry about the world, about Jonah and what to do with Ana.

And about Sam, whom she was going to visit again before her next expedition, and how Lara was going to save her come hell or high water.

But for tonight she'd settle for having made it through another day.


End file.
